“Creeps me out that you can see them,” I said. The dead, I mean. That was part of Asher’s gift. “Also,” I added, waving apologetically at empty space, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend. Honest.”
“Tabi-tabi po,” Asher muttered softly. He’d used the Filipino phrase a few times since we entered Latham’s Cross.
I’d learned snatches of new-to-me languages from living with the boys at the Boneyard – bits of Spanish from Gil, and surprisingly, Sterling, who religiously followed a shockingly large number of telenovelas. What very few Filipino words I knew were picked up from Mama Rosa and Asher.
According to Asher, “Tabi-tabi po” loosely translated to “Pardon me,” or “Just passing through.” It was a catch-all phrase used to tell the spirits of the earth, whether or not they were human in nature, that we meant them no harm or disrespect.
“Asher is quite correct,” Carver said, his eyebrow curved like a scimitar. “Cultivating a deep sense of respect for the departed is not only good practice for keeping their spirits appeased.” He turned his attention back to Asher, and I allowed myself to breathe easy again. “It is key to tapping into necromantic energies. At least if you want to do it the clean way.”
I didn’t want to give much thought to the nefarious alternatives he was hinting at.
“Can you sense them?” Carver said to Asher. “All around you. I know you see them, but as a necromancer, you must understand that they are drawn to you. They can see the living, but few will hear, or listen. Many mortals will be frightened and confused. That is not your place. I want you to accept your position in the world at large, Asher. I want you to see.”
Asher’s eyes glowed
with green fire, the physical manifestation of his necromantic power. I knew that he could see and communicate with the dead – hell, barely hours after I first met him I found out that he sometimes liked to talk to the spirit of his own long-dead mother.
Maybe it was that shared experience that endeared him to me in the first place, that made us friends. He had it worse off, though. I don’t think that poor Asher had ever even met his own father. At least I had Norman Graves.
“There’s so many of them,” Asher muttered. “All around us. And they’re looking at me, Carver. They’re looking at me.”
“Good. Don’t be afraid. Do nothing to harm them, and they will do nothing to you. The angry or hungry dead may hold ill will towards the living, but all understand and respect the power and stature of a necromancer. They can help you, Asher. Give you information, find what living hands and eyes cannot find. But they will want your aid in return.”
As cool as this all was, I couldn’t help feeling a little left out. Asher gazed around him, eyes burning with emerald fire as he stared at the shades and spirits of Valero’s dead. Carver stood at his side, one hand gripped firmly around his shoulder – for support, or to anchor him to the world of the living, I couldn’t tell.
So I wandered off, looking for some way to busy myself. And naturally, my feet carried me in the direction of the place I’d avoided for way too long: my mother’s grave.
The slab that held her name wasn’t as grubby as I’d expected, and I knew that there was one reason alone for that. Dad had clearly made more of an effort to visit her. The browned stalks of flowers that had long ago lost their petals sat in a crumbling bundle on her grave, turning to dust under my fingers. I folded my feet under my body, sitting cross-legged on her grave, and I sighed.
“Sorry, Mom,” I muttered. “I know it’s been a while – a long while. But you won’t believe how much things have changed for me. For Dad, even. I think you might even be proud of me. Of us.”
I sniffed a little, surprised that I was getting so emotional. Or maybe I shouldn’t have been. There was a reason I’d been avoiding coming to her grave all this time, after all. It still hurt, after all these years, knowing that Diana Graves was no longer with us, and it hurt even more knowing that someone I once trusted had been responsible for her death. I reached under my shirt, probing for the star-metal necklace that had once belonged to her. I held its coolness against my fingers, traced the facets of the garnet that served as its pendant.
“I wish you could see me now, Mom. I’m a wizard.” I laughed out loud, still unused to how ridiculous that sounded in my own ears. “Okay, I’m a mage. There’s all these subtle distinctions to this shit, and I’m pretty sure a wizard is someone who’s spent a lot of time learning magic, which is so not me. But I can teleport through shadows. I can make fire with my bare hands. Isn’t that insane?”
God, it felt good to talk, even knowing she wouldn’t ever answer.
“And I’m helping people,” I said, finally settling down. “I’m finally doing something good with my life, Mom. I can’t believe it myself.”
And as I eased further into the grass, spreading my legs in front of me to get comfortable as I prepared to tell my mother’s headstone every single damn detail of my life in the arcane underground, I realized that the air was different. Not the air, exactly, but the atmosphere. There was the ambient birdsong, the rustle of leaves as wind blew through the trees, and the distant sounds of traffic, far outside the cemetery.
But there was something else there, a distant, familiar humming. And layered with it was a strange sort of a whistle, a keening sound, like a massive kettle about to boil.
No. Not again.
I sprang to my feet, scanning the graveyard for the source of the noise, but Latham’s Cross was clear. No, the dirge of the Eldest was being sung from somewhere further off. My heart pounded as I watched the clouds swirling above the city, as an ominous, searing white light gathered just behind them, like a terrible, eldritch sun.
“The dead,” Asher’s voice droned behind me. I turned to him, his blazing green eyes sweeping Latham’s Cross, his hands over his ears. “Carver. I see them, I hear them.”
Carver said nothing, his own false eye glowing like amber, watching the pillar of light falling from out of the sky, like a fist from the heavens.
“The dead,” Asher breathed. “They’re screaming.”
Chapter 8
Carver flicked his wrist at the ground, and before either Asher or I could react the grass burst into brilliant amber flames. I held my breath. Relax, Dust. It was just a teleportation spell. Where we were going, though, I couldn’t be sure.
The fire consumed me, skin and muscle and molecules, and in an orange flash of light the flames blossomed again, returning our bodies to this reality, in a different location. Only – I wasn’t sure where that was, exactly.